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Donald Trump and his team have been fixated in recent months on renaming things. From the Gulf of Mexico to the USNS Harvey Milk, from Veterans Day to the Persian Gulf, the president and his administration have made it painfully clear: They’re not satisfied with names and labels that much of the public finds familiar, and they’re eager to impose new ones.
This is especially true when it comes to U.S. military bases, with the Republican administration having already renamed Fort Liberty in North Carolina to Fort Bragg, and Georgia’s Fort Moore to Fort Benning. As NBC News reported, that list is poised to grow.
Trump said at Fort Bragg [on Tuesday] that he plans to restore the names of several military bases that were renamed during the Biden administration. ‘We are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill and Fort Robert E. Lee,’ Trump said. ‘We won a lot of battles out of those forts. It’s no time to change.’
Of course, the Confederate names have already been changed. When the president said, “It’s no time to change,” he apparently meant the opposite: Now is precisely the time that he wants to impose changes.
Team Trump continues to play a little game with the monikers. As The New York Times reported, “In a statement, the Army said it would ‘take immediate action’ to restore the old names of the bases originally honoring Confederates, but the base names would instead honor other American soldiers with similar names and initials.”
For example, Fort Gordon was originally named after John Brown Gordon, a Confederate slave owner and suspected Ku Klux Klan member, and it was changed to Fort Eisenhower, honoring Dwight D. Eisenhower. Now, it will return to being Fort Gordon again, but this time, it’ll be named after a — wink, wink — different person with the same last name.
There’s no shortage of problems with such a move, but among the most important is the fact that Trump is openly defying Congress — again.
I realize that memories are often short in politics, but in the waning weeks of Trump’s first term — after his 2020 defeat, but before Jan. 6 — the president took a break from trying to overturn the election results to veto funding for the U.S. military. He did so for a handful of reasons, including one he wouldn’t stop whining about: There was bipartisan support for renaming military bases that had been named after Confederate military leaders who took up arms against the United States, and a provision on this was included in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
Democrats and Republicans managed to agree on this point in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and national protests in support of social justice. It wasn’t easy, but after considerable debate, the parties came to a consensus.
After Trump rejected the NDAA, lopsided bipartisan majorities in both chambers easily overrode his veto. This, in turn, led to the creation of a congressional commission, which ultimately proposed new names that were approved, wrapping up a yearslong process.
Trump has decided simply to undo all of this work and defy Congress — because he feels like it.
The president’s move, the Times’ report added, “skirts the law.” Whether there are any consequences for this remains to be seen.